LMFYFF ‘Backhander’ 4 – 27 November 2011

studio1.1 presents ‘Backhander’ a solo exhibition of new work from London-based comic art project Let Me Feel Your Finger First (LMFYFF). The show features three new animated works: ‘Post-Colonial Cannibal’, a new installment of the ‘Ontologically Anxious Organism’ series and ‘Backhander’.

Let Me Feel Your Finger First is unusual amongst artist-animators in that, rather than rejecting conventional character animation, they have chosen to embrace it, dissect it, play with it. Each of these new LMFYFF characters has their roots in animation, whether that implies children’s cartoon, character-based scenario, frame-by-frame construction or simply ‘attaining motility’. But LMFYFF characters are designed to provoke rather than entertain: a cooking pot whose Jack-in-the-Box inhabitants allude to animation’s ignoble history of racial stereotyping, a character whose existential anxiety compels him to disguise himself as a rock from an Asterix comic background and a pair of puppets who satirise pretentious, art-world careerists. Ontologically Anxious Organism (Episode Two) will be premiered simultaneously in an online exhibition at Animate Projects www.animateprojects.org

Acting Dumb and Playing Dead a text by writer and curator Angela Kingston accompanies the show.

Ontologically Anxious Organism is nervous about the notion of character. He feels the other members of his comic family trying to rise up inside him and use him as an exit. So he disguised himself as a boulder (the type of boulder one might overlook in some Asterix comic). In Episode Two of the animated series, Ontologically Anxious Organism grapples with existence as he meets his maker.

In the 1930s a popular genre of animated film emerged in the United States – the cannibal cartoon – in which the anthropomorphised white ‘hero’, marooned on an island, was captured by a tribe of savage black cannibals and thrown into the cooking pot. LMFYFF’s provocative new character Post-Colonial Colonial is a Frankenstein creation, reconfigured from the vestiges of this half-forgotten, problematical imagery. A character that remixes the conventional cartoon ‘savage’ and takes aim at animation’s ignoble history of racial stereotyping. Anthropophagy and anthropomorphism: constructing ‘Post-Colonial Cannibal’ an article by LMFYFF on the development of the character was recently published in the inaugural edition of Animation Practice, Process and Production (Ed. Paul Wells) LMFYFF recently gave a lecture performance on the Post-Colonial Cannibal project at the acclaimed independent music and arts festival Supernormal, held in Braziers Park, Oxfordshire each August.

LET ME FEEL YOUR FINGER FIRST is a London-based comic art project that disseminates comics, animation, live art, drawing and web-based work. At the centre of the project is a family of characters that includes Francis, Uncle Hans-Peter and Ontologically Anxious Organism. LMFYFF exhibits in galleries and online and the animated films have screened at film festivals internationally. Past projects include the animated short ‘Homo Zombies’, ‘Francis’ an Animate Projects commission for Channel 4 and the live works ‘Familienalbum’ first performed at the Royal Academy, London and ‘The Uncle Hans-Peter Party’ at the ICA, London.